Week 2 | Osamu Tezuka

Presentation Project Proposal

For my presentation, I would like to showcase the manga, Golden Kamuy, a historical-fiction taking place mainly in Hokkaido after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. As a contemporary Shonen manga, it stands out amongst the crowd as not only as a historical fiction, but also as a very well researched insight on Hokkaido's indigenous people, the Ainu. Since the manga's publication in 2014, Golden Kamuy has been able to garner more public interest towards the declining Ainu culture and population.

This topic is suited for either the Shonen/Seinen or Contemporary Week.

Ayako

Well... Ayako... was something alright. Where do I begin. Let's start with the art.

A series of pages I really enjoyed in its use of the same panel format to highlight the confined space, realistic time lapse, and the desperation in Genta's plea

The art is absolutely lovely to look at. Tezuka's paneling sensibilities shine throughout the manga, making use of panel size, orientation and repetition to convey the mood and time in a very elegant manner. To me, I felt his use of panels and the space within them bore a strong resemblance to western comics. His environment drawings were absolutely beautiful and showcase a completely different inking skill set than his thick lined characters. The art of Ayako truly surprised me since I only knew Tezuka for AstroBoy, so it was very nice being able to see a width breath of his artistic abilities.

Okay, let's just jump into the meat of things when it comes to the story. It's a series of unfortunate events that starts bad and just keeps getting worse and worse and worse with each page for these characters. I know character writing involves letting your characters suffer but Tezuka really took the hammer to his characters this time and just went a-smashing. And then brought out the gunshow. And the industrial steam roller. And just kept going until he mashed them into the ground. Literally.

Ayako is an extremely tragic tale for the Tenge family and only Ayako comes out alive in the end (minus the mother who kind of minds her own business), but not in a state anyone would be optimistic about. In fact, I didn't even think that was the ending until I hit next page and the scanlation site I was reading this on gave me a pearly white page of "That's all folks!" For me, this manga is a tale of everyone has their vices and guilt, a story of personal evil spiraling out of control. But turned up to 11.

The sheer amount of despair and absurdity that happened to these characters almost made the events comical. When reading the last couple of chapters, I began to recount a summary of events to a friend sitting next to me at the time. While explaining, I began to realize just how bizarre the events were and how convoluted the relationships between the characters were. When you begin to paraphrase things without the drama, it becomes a great comedy. Here's an example:

Jiro: [Explains his sap story for why he killed Eno]

Naoko: ...

[Naoko stabs Jiro in the neck]

Jiro: ?!?! I just told you my sad story and you stab me?!

Naoko: I said I was gonna have my revenge, did I stutter?

Naoko: ....

Naoko: Hey, you're kind of like... really bleeding huh...

Naoko: Are you like... okay my dude....

Naoko: I-I'm just uh gonna g-go run and find a doctor you stay there

So perhaps it's strange of me to say that while the end is supposed to be the saddest, most tragic part of the story, it became the most comedic part to me after I started reading things like this. Anyways, Ayako, while being really, really weird, was a page turner for the sole reason of me wanting to see just how much more Tezuka could make these character's lives a living hell.

I rate Ayako with 25 Tezukas running around with hammers.